De mortuis nil nisi bonum, indeed, but I did experience a brief pang of exasperation with the late Mike Reid this week, when I realised that the memory of him I would like to share with you in this column is, alas, unprintable in a family newspaper. It is a long, rambling, loopingly repetitive joke that involves a donkey, a small boy and a streak of lightning, and it ends with one of the funniest punchlines I have ever heard. When Mike Reid told the story, it took about half an hour and ended with up with a tearful audience being removed to hospital; when I attempt to recreate it, it takes two minutes and ends with shaken heads, the whistle of tumbleweed and the distinct sense of a line having been crossed. Such is the infinite variety of life but still, I wish I were better at telling jokes.

At the same time, I had cause to remember one of my only interactions with Ingmar Bergman, which, in all truth, didn't end very successfully. Mindful of the crater in my cultural landscape, I had gone to see Wild Strawberries at the National Film Theatre. What I mainly remember now is its opening sequence, which features a handless clock, the appearance of a hearse and the accidental spilling of a coffin onto the cobbles. With flick-knife analytical savvy, I instantly intuited that this was not going to be a bundle of laughs. That cheery vignette turns out to be a dream but, being the kind of person who doesn't enjoy a very bright and breezy dream life herself, I didn't find that much of a comfort.

I might have had a more fruitful relationship with Bergman had Wild Strawberries had a bit more of Mike Reid's kids' quiz show Runaround about it, although that venerable institution had its own nightmarish qualities. I never appeared on the programme because I had already been traumatised by an appearance on an early episode of Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, in which I had been attempting to skulk at the back of the studio audience when Noel Edmonds bounced up to me and asked me, live on national television, if I had a hobby. 'No,' I mumbled, suddenly gripped by stage fright. He persisted. 'Not at all?' he chided, chummily. 'You must do something when you're not at school!' At which point, and purple in the face, all I could think of saying was 'Not really, no'. Naturally, I have never been on telly again.

But Runaround had distinct potential as a vehicle for imparting some of life's thornier lessons to children. Not least: when you are faced with the dilemma of whether you should stick with the large circle onto which you have jumped in order to answer a random general knowledge question, or whether you should abandon it because others appear to be swimming in a different direction, you must exhibit decisiveness and courage. At the same time, you must recognise that your decision may be wrong, and that you may have forfeited your chance to win a luxury dart-board or a Chad Valley Give-A-Show slide projector for ever. And, if that is indeed the case, then it is something you will just have to live with.

This seems not a million miles away from the emotional terrain of Wild Strawberries, with its hinterland of responsibility and regret, although it is true that Runaround would perhaps have had more of an edge had the grim reaper materialised to scythe down the kids who leapt the wrong way - although the programme did, of course, feature a dungeon. It is wildly unlikely that Runaround's producers were deliberately introducing images of incarceration and entrapment as a homage to existentialist cinema, but you can never be sure how cultural connections are unconsciously forged. I certainly feel that Wild Strawberries may have held me in thrall for longer had a character suddenly sprung to his feet and yelled the instruction to 'G-g-g-g-go!'